Thorns Will Be Necessary: The Appeal of the Flawed Character
September 25, 2025 by Beth Ann Bauman, writing for children and young adult faculty One of my favorite TV shows is the HBO crime drama...| Good River Review
September 25, 2025 by Beth Ann Bauman, writing for children and young adult faculty One of my favorite TV shows is the HBO crime drama...| Good River Review
In a move that aligns all of Spalding’s creative writing programs for the first time, the Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Creative Writing has joined its graduate-level sister programs under the umbrella of the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing. The July 1 move builds on existing ties between the BFA in Creative Writing and Spalding’s nationally recognized low-residency MFA in Writing, giving undergraduate students a front-row seat to the literary world. Week-long ...| Good River Review
August 27, 2025 by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty As of this writing, I am a little past the halfway point in my reading for the...| Good River Review
September 11, 2025 by Nancy McCabe, creative nonfiction and fiction faculty I’m working on a craft book, Creating Some Measure of...| Good River Review
Also, announcing faculty and guest books and scripts in common for Fall 2025—and our pre-lecture in W4TVSS and residency workshop...| Good River Review
August 27, 2025 by Lynnell Edwards, poetry faculty As of this writing, I am a little past the halfway point in my reading for the Sealey Challenge. IYKYK that the Sealey is a formidable but rewarding challenge to read a book a day for the month of August. The modest website explains that the challenge was initiated in 2017 by poet Nicole Sealey, who, frustrated by trying to balance her professional responsibilities with promoting her first book, “decided to challenge herself to a person...| Good River Review
Arianna Rebolini Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die HarperCollins / April 2025 / 352 pp / $30 Hardcover Reviewed by Hope...| Good River Review
August 14, 2025 by Whitney Collins, fiction faculty Back in the 1900s, when my friends and I were growing up relatively unplugged and easily entertained, we often played Mad Libs, a word game that prompted players to fill in the blanks of a half-completed story with random nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The result was always a creative and non-sensical tale that illustrated the power of word choice and surprise. Fast-forward to the early 21st century, when I was no longer playing Mad Libs but| Good River Review
EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students Colleen Alles ’s ...| Good River Review
The fall 2025 edition of Spalding’s Business of Writing Seminars takes place 10:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. ET Saturday, September 6, for...| Good River Review
by Kathleen Driskell, Chair, Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing In less than two months, Naslund-Mann students and alumni will...| Good River Review
July 24, 2025 By Greg Pape, poetry faculty On the hottest day of the year, the poetry workshop of the Spalding MFA summer residency program met on the fourth floor of a building near Kyoto Station in a room with no windows. I had prepared a talk on Bashō and read from The Narrow Road to the Deep North, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa. Bashō came to Kyoto as a young man after the death of his friend Yoshitada. Yuasa tells us not much is known about the next five years of Bashō’s life. “It...| Good River Review
Martín EspadaJailbreak of SparrowsAlfred A. Knopf / 2025 / 114 pp / $29 HardbackReviewed by James Long / June 2025 About a third of the way through his new collection, in a poem titled “The Critic’s Tongue Did Not Sparkle with the Diamond Stickpin of Wit,” Martín Espada shares this chilling exchange from a highbrow dinner conversation: Puerto Ricans? You’ve got a drug problem. Here’s how you fix it. Deport the drug dealers. Deport the addicts. Deport anyone who won’t talk to ...| Good River Review
EXCITING NEWS & UPDATES FROM SPALDING'S NASLUND-MANN SCHOOL OF WRITING STUDENTS, ALUMNI, FACULTY & STAFF Students Colleen Alles (P)...| Good River Review
June 12, 2025 By Larry Brenner, faculty, writing for TV, screen, and stage In our conversations on the Once Upon a Disney podcast, my co-host Andie Redwine and I had a discussion of who we thought the true villain of Peter Pan (1953) was. While the obvious answer is Captain Hook, I’ve always read Peter Pan as having a more subtle, sinister force operating behind the scenes. I recently revisited this conversation as we are preparing our book—working title Write Like a Mouse: Analyzing Di...| Good River Review
May 22, 2025 By John Pipkin, fiction faculty One concern that I often hear about delivering critiques in workshop (especially from my undergraduate students) is a version of the question “What if I’m wrong?” or “How do I know if I’ve read the piece correctly?” These are understandable concerns, especially in the semi-public forum of the writing workshop, where you not only need to have a concrete opinion, but you also have to say it out loud in front of other writers and then st...| Good River Review
May 8, 2025 by Leah Henderson, writing for children and young adults faculty On any given day, I hear or read a new article, blog post,...| Good River Review
For the second half of the Summer 2025 virtual residency, students will participate in a faculty-led, special-topic, mini-workshop that...| Good River Review
April 23, 2025 by Nancy McCabe, creative nonfiction and fiction faculty Over the last year or so, I launched two books: in March 2024...| Good River Review
Each day it seems our country is shrinking further in its capacity to feel and express compassion for our neighbors. In the midst of...| Good River Review
Roisín O’Donnell Nesting Algonquin Books / February 2025 / 400 pp / $29.00 Hardcover Reviewed by pine breaks / April 2025 Nesting is...| Good River Review
